“Ray,” I said, but before the name had left my mouth, he leaned into me and caught my open mouth in his. It was so unexpected,
even though I had waited weeks for it, that I wanted more. I wanted so badly to kiss Ray Singh again.
The following morning Mr. Connors cut out an article from the paper and saved it for Ruth. It was a detailed drawing of the
Flanagan sinkhole and how it was going to be filled in. While Ruth dressed, he penned a note to her. “This is a crock of shit,”
it said. “Someday some poor sap’s car is going to fall into it all over again.”
“Dad says this is the death knell for him,” Ruth said to Ray, waving the clipping at him as she got into Ray’s ice blue Chevy
at the end of her driveway. “Our place is going to be swallowed up in subdivision land. Get this. In this article they have
four blocks like the cubes you draw in beginning art class, and it’s supposed to show how they’re going to patch the sinkhole
up.”
“Nice to see you too, Ruth,” Ray said, reversing out of the driveway while making eyes at Ruth’s unbuckled seat belt.
“Sorry,” Ruth said. “Hello.”
“What does the article say?” Ray asked.
“Nice day today, beautiful weather.”
“Okay, okay. Tell me about the article.”
Every time he saw Ruth after a few months had passed, he was reminded of her impatience and her curiosity—two traits that
had both made and kept them friends.
“The first three are the same drawing only with different arrows pointing to different places and saying ‘topsoil,’ ‘cracked
limestone,’ and ‘dissolving rock.’ The last one has a big headline that says, ‘Patching it’ and underneath it says, ‘Concrete
fills the throat and grout fills the cracks.’ ”
“Throat?” Ray said.
“I know,” said Ruth. “Then there’s this other arrow on the other side as if this was such a huge project that they had to
pause a second so readers could understand the concept, and this one says, ‘Then the hole is filled with dirt.’ ”
Ray started laughing.
“Like a medical procedure,” Ruth said. “Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”
“I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears.”
“I’ll say,” Ruth said. “They have throats, for God’s sake! Hey, let’s check this out.”
A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved
roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers.
Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet
uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.
Ruth didn’t wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.
“My mom says he still lives at home and can’t get a job.”
“What does he do all day?” Ray asked.
“Look creepy, I guess.”
“He never got over it,” Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main
road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of
the sinkhole.
Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being
involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered
from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had killed. He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his
neighbors and wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and dogs. For me the saddest thing was that these animals
smelled the brokenness in him—the human defect—and kept away.
Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were about to pass, I saw Len coming out of an apartment over
Joe’s barbershop. He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to his car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young
woman who owned the apartment. She had asked him out for coffee one day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology
course at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a combination of things—some of which he would show my father and
some that no child’s parent needed to see. The latter included the photos of the graves of the recovered bodies—both elbows
there in each case.
When he had called the hospital, the nurse had told him Mr. Salmon was with his wife and family. Now his guilt thickened as
he pulled his car into the hospital parking lot and sat for a moment with the hot sun coming through the windshield, baking
in the heat.
I could see Len working on how to state what he had to say. He could work with only one assumption in his head—after almost
seven years of ever more dwindling contact since late 1975, what my parents would hope for most was a body or the news that
Mr. Harvey had been found. What he had to give them was a charm.
He grabbed his knapsack and locked up the car, passing by the girl outside with her replenished buckets of daffodils. He knew
the number of my father’s room, so he did not bother announcing himself to the fifth-floor nurses’ station but merely tapped
lightly on my father’s open door before walking in.
My mother was standing with her back toward him. When she turned, I could see the force of her presence hit him. She was holding
my father’s hand. I suddenly felt terribly lonely.
My mother wobbled a bit when she met Len’s eyes, and then she led with what came easiest.
“Is it
ever
wonderful to see you?” she tried to joke.
“Len,” my father managed. “Abbie, will you tilt me up?”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Salmon?” Len asked as my mother pressed the up arrow button on the bed.
“Jack, please,” my father insisted.
“Before you get your hopes up,” Len said, “we haven’t caught him.”
My father visibly deflated.
My mother readjusted the foam pillows behind my father’s back and neck. “Then why are you here?” she asked.
“We found an item of Susie’s,” Len said.
He had used almost the same sentence when he’d come to the house with the jingle-bell hat. It was a distant echo in her head.
The night before, as first my mother watched my father sleeping and then my father woke to see her head beside his on his pillow,
they had both been staving off the memory of that first night of snow and hail and rain and how they had clung to each other,
neither of them voicing aloud their greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who’d finally said it: “She’s never coming
home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she
needed to hear him say it.
“It’s a charm off her bracelet,” Len said. “A Pennsylvania keystone with her initials on it.”
“I bought that for her,” my father said. “At Thirtieth Street Station when I went into the city one day. They had a booth,
and a man wearing safety glasses etched in initials for free. I brought Lindsey one too. Remember, Abigail?”
“I remember,” my mother said.
“We found it near a grave in Connecticut.”
My parents were suddenly still for a moment—like animals trapped in ice—their eyes frozen open and beseeching whoever walked
above them to release them now, please.
“It wasn’t Susie,” Len said, rushing to fill the space. “What it means is that Harvey has been linked to other murders in Delaware
and Connecticut. It was at the grave site outside Hartford where we found Susie’s charm.”
My father and mother watched as Len fumbled to open the slightly jammed zipper of his knapsack. My mother smoothed my father’s
hair back and tried to catch his eye. But my father was focused on the prospect Len presented—my murder case reopening. And
my mother, just when she was beginning to feel on more solid ground, had to hide the fact that she’d never wanted it to begin
again. The name George Harvey silenced her. She had never known what to say about him. For my mother, connecting her life
to his capture and punishment spoke more about choosing to live with the enemy than about having to learn to live in the world
without me.
Len pulled out a large Ziploc bag. At the bottom corner of the bag my parents could see the glint of gold. Len handed it to
my mother, and she held it in front of her, slightly away from her body.
“Don’t you need this, Len?” my father asked.
“We did all the tests on it,” he said. “We’ve documented where it was found and taken the required photographs. The time may
come when I would have to ask for it back, but until then, it’s yours to keep.”
“Open it, Abbie,” my father said.
I watched my mother hold open the bag and lean over the bed. “It’s for you, Jack,” she said. “It was a gift from you.”
As my father reached in, his hand shook, and it took him a second to feel the small, sharp edges of the keystone against the
flesh of his fingers. The way he drew it out of the bag reminded me of playing the game Operation with Lindsey when we were
little. If he touched the sides of the Ziploc bag an alarm would go off and he would have to forfeit.
“How can you be sure he killed these other girls?” my mother asked. She stared at the tiny ember of gold in my father’s palm.
“Nothing is ever certain,” Len said.
And the echo rang in her ears again. Len had a fixed set of phrases. It was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to
soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.
“I think I want you to leave now,” she said.
“Abigail?” my father queried.
“I can’t hear anymore.”
“I’m very glad to have the charm, Len,” my father said.
Len doffed an imaginary cap to my father before turning to go. He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she
went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting. It was the kind he made more and more in the rooms above the barbershop.
I headed south toward Ruth and Ray, but I saw Mr. Harvey instead. He was driving an orange patchwork car that had been pieced
together from so many different versions of the same make and model that it looked like Frankenstein’s monster on wheels.
A bungee cord held the front hood, which fluttered up and down as it caught the oncoming air.
The engine had resisted anything but a shimmer above the speed limit no matter how hard he pressed the gas pedal. He had slept
next to an empty grave, and while he’d been sleeping he had dreamed of the 5! 5! 5!, waking near dawn to make the drive to
Pennsylvania.
The edges of Mr. Harvey seemed oddly blurred. For years he had kept at bay the memories of the women he killed, but now, one
by one, they were coming back.
The first girl he’d hurt was by accident. He got mad and couldn’t stop himself, or that was how he began to weave it into sense.
She stopped going to the high school that they were both enrolled in, but this didn’t seem strange to him. By that time he
had moved so many times that he assumed that was what the girl had done. He had regretted it, this quiet, muffled rape of a
school friend, but he didn’t see it as something that would stay with either one of them. It was as if something outside him
had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one afternoon. For a second afterward, she’d stared. It was bottomless.
Then she put on her torn underpants, tucking them into her skirt’s waistband to keep them in place. They didn’t speak, and
she left. He cut himself with his penknife along the back of his hand. When his father asked about the blood, there would
be a plausible explanation. “See,” he could say, and point to the place on his hand. “It was an accident.”
But his father didn’t ask, and no one came around looking for him. No father or brother or policeman.
Then what I saw was what Mr. Harvey felt beside him. This girl, who had died only a few years later when her brother fell
asleep smoking a cigarette. She was sitting in the front seat. I wondered how long it would take before he began to remember
me.
The only signs of change since the day Mr. Harvey had delivered me up to the Flanagans’ were the orange pylons set around
the lot. That and the evidence that the sinkhole had expanded. The house’s southeast corner sloped downward, and the front
porch was quietly sinking into the earth.
As a precaution, Ray parked on the other side of Flat Road, under a section of overgrown shrubbery. Even so, the passenger
side skimmed the edge of the pavement. “What happened to the Flanagans?” Ray asked as they got out of his car.
“My father said the corporation that bought the property gave them a settlement and they took off.”
“It’s spooky around here, Ruth,” Ray said.
They crossed the empty road. Above them the sky was a light blue, a few smoky clouds dotting the air. From where they stood
they could just make out the back of Hal’s bike shop on the other side of the railroad tracks.
“I wonder if Hal Heckler still owns that?” Ruth said. “I had a crush on him when we were growing up.”
Then she turned toward the lot. They were quiet. Ruth moved in ever-diminishing circles, with the hole and its vague edge
as their goal. Ray trailed just behind Ruth as she led the way. If you saw it from a distance, the sinkhole seemed innocuous—like
an overgrown mud puddle just starting to dry out. There were spots of grass and weeds surrounding it and then, if you looked
close enough, it was as if the earth stopped and a light cocoa-colored flesh began. It was soft and convex, and it drew in
items placed on top of it.
“How do you know it won’t swallow us?” Ray asked.
“We’re not heavy enough,” Ruth said.
“Stop if you feel yourself sinking.”
Watching them I remembered holding on to Buckley’s hand the day we went to bury the refrigerator. While my father was talking
to Mr. Flanagan, Buckley and I walked up to the point where the earth sloped down and softened, and I swore I felt it give
ever so slightly beneath my feet. It had been the same sensation as walking in the graveyard of our church and suddenly sinking
into the hollow tunnels that the moles had dug among the headstones.